9/11 panel's forgotten concern: CIA

The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has focused attention again on the high-profile commission set up to investigate them, but one of the blue-ribbon panel’s most significant recommendations on how to combat terrorists is virtually ignored these days — and has been forcefully rejected by two successive administrations.

The 9/11 commission’s unanimous report issued in 2004 recommended that the CIA surrender control over “paramilitary” operations, specifically including unmanned armed drones, to the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command.

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“Lead responsibility for directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the Defense Department,” the commission wrote. “Whether the price is measured in either money or people, the United States cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret military operations, secretly operating standoff missiles and secretly training foreign military or paramilitary forces. The United States should concentrate responsibility and necessary legal authorities in one entity.”

If anything, the Obama administration has run headlong in the other direction, massively ramping up the CIA’s program while also maintaining a parallel military drone campaign.

In Pakistan alone, the CIA’s drones have killed approximately 2,000 people since 2004, according to reports from the Conflict Monitoring Center and the New America Foundation. The vast majority of the deaths came since the beginning of 2009, the reports said.

Now, even the commission’s former chairman and vice chairman seem to be downplaying the recommendation.

Last week, former Gov. Tom Kean (R-N.J.) and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) released a “Tenth Anniversary Report Card” on the commission’s proposals that highlighted nine “major” recommendations that were incomplete.

Among other things cited in the new study, produced by the Bipartisan Policy Center and an unofficial follow-up commission called the National Security Preparedness Group: standardized identification for Americans, a better tracking system for foreigners exiting the country, an oversight board to safeguard civil liberties and streamlining congressional oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.

But the new “report card” said nothing about the recommendation on moving paramilitary operations from CIA to DoD, nor does it mention the mushrooming drone effort.

A staffer involved in producing the “report card” told POLITICO that the list of nine unfulfilled recommendations was not intended to be comprehensive. The follow-up report also focused on areas where the authors thought additional progress could be achieved in the near term.

While many government officials in recent days have again paid tribute to the work of the 10-member commission, they have made it clear that calling for the transfer of paramilitary operations out of the CIA remains unpopular at the highest echelons.